“Yes, sir,” Ralph whispered to his mango juice.

“Now get the fuck outa here. No, go that way. And don’t look back.”

Then Jax was moving in the opposite direction, back to 116th Street, losing himself in the crowds of shoppers. Head down, moving fast, despite the limp, but not so fast as to attract attention.

Up the street another tour bus squealed to a stop in front of the site of the long-dead Harlem World, and some anemic rap dribbled from a speaker inside the gaudy vehicle. But at the moment the blood-painting King of Graffiti wasn’t reflecting on Harlem, hip-hop or his criminal past. He had his gun. He knew where the girl was. The only thing he was thinking about now was how long it would take him to get to Langston Hughes High.

The petite Asian woman eyed Sachs cautiously.

The uneasiness was no wonder, the detective supposed, considering that she was surrounded by a half dozen officers who were twice her size – and that another dozen waited on the sidewalk outside her store.

“Good morning,” Sachs said. “This man we’re looking for? It’s very important we find him. He may’ve committed some serious crimes.” She was speaking a bit more slowly than she supposed was politically correct.

Which was, it turned out, a tidy faux pas.

“I understand that,” the woman said in perfect English, with a French accent, no less. “I told those other officers everything I could think of. I was pretty scared. With him trying the stocking cap on, you understand. Pulling it down like it was a mask. Scary.”

“I’m sure it was,” Sachs said, picking up her verbal pace a bit. “Say, you mind if we take your fingerprints?”

This was to verify that they were her prints on the receipt and merchandise found at the museum library scene. The woman agreed, and a portable analyzer verified that they were hers.

Sachs then asked, “You’re sure you don’t have any idea who he is or where he lives?”

“None. He’s only been in here once or twice. Maybe more, but he’s the sort of person you never seem to notice. Average. Didn’t smile, didn’t frown, didn’t say anything. Totally average.”

Not a bad look for a killer, Sachs reflected. “What about your other employees?”

“I asked them all. None of them remember him.”

Sachs opened the suitcase, replaced the fingerprint analyzer and pulled out a Toshiba computer. In a minute she’d booted it up and loaded the Electronic Facial Identification Technique software. This was a computerized version of the old Identikit, used to re-create images of suspects’ faces. The manual system used preprinted cards of human features and hair, which officers combined and showed to witnesses to create a likeness of a suspect. EFIT used software to do the same, producing a nearly photographic image.

Within five minutes, Sachs had a composite picture of a jowly, clean-shaven white man with trim, light brown hair, in his forties. He looked like any one of a million middle-aged businessmen or contractors or store clerks you’d find in the metro area.

Average…

“Do you remember what he wore?”

There’s a companion program to EFIT, which will dress the suspect’s image in various outfits – like mounting clothes on paper dolls. But the woman couldn’t recall anything other than a dark raincoat.

She added, “Oh, one thing. I think he had a Southern accent.”

Sachs nodded and jotted this into her notebook. She then hooked up a small laser printer and soon had two dozen five-by-seven-inch copies of Unsub 109’s image, with a short description of his height, weight and the fact he might be wearing a raincoat and had an accent. She added the warning that he targeted innocents. These she handed to Bo Haumann, the grizzled, crew-cut former drill instructor who was now head of the Emergency Services Unit, which was New York ’s tactical group. He in turn distributed the pictures to his officers and the uniformed patrolmen who were here with the team. Haumann divided the law enforcers up – mixing Patrol with ESU, which had heavier firepower – and ordered them to start canvassing the neighborhood.

The dozen officers dispersed.

NYPD, the constabulary of the city of cool, put their tactical teams not in army-style armored personnel carriers but in off-the-shelf squad cars and vans and carted their equipment around in an ESU bus – a nondescript blue-and-white truck. One of these was now parked near the store as a staging vehicle.

Sachs and Sellitto pulled on body armor with shock plates over the heart and headed into Little Italy. The neighborhood had changed dramatically in the past fifteen years. Once a huge enclave of working-class Italian immigrants, it had shrunk to nearly nothing, owing to the spread of Chinatown from the south, and young professionals from the north and west. On Mulberry Street the two detectives now passed an emblem of this change: the building that was the former Ravenite Social Club, home of the Gambino crime family, which long-gone John Gotti had headed. The club had been seized by the government – resulting in the inevitable nickname “Club Fed” – and was now just another commercial building looking for a tenant.

The two detectives picked a block and began their canvass, flashing their shields and the picture of the unsub to street vendors and clerks in stores, teenagers cutting classes and sipping Starbucks coffee, retirees on benches or front stairs. They’d occasionally hear reports from the other officers. “Nothing…Negative on Grand, K…Copy that…Negative on Hester, K…We’re trying east…”

Sellitto and Sachs continued along their own route, having no more luck than anyone else.

A loud bang behind them.

Sachs gasped – not at the noise, which she recognized immediately as a truck backfire – but at Sellitto’s reaction. He’d jumped aside, actually taking cover behind a phone kiosk, his hand on the grip of his revolver.

He blinked and swallowed. Gave a shallow laugh. “Fucking trucks,” he muttered.

“Yeah,” Sachs said.

He wiped his face and they continued on.

Sitting in his safe house, smelling garlic from one of the nearby restaurants in Little Italy, Thompson Boyd was huddled over a book, reading the instructions it offered and then examining what he’d bought at the hardware store an hour ago.

He marked certain pages with yellow Post-it tabs and jotted notes in the margins. The procedures he was studying were a bit tricky but he knew he’d work through them. There wasn’t anything you couldn’t do if you took your time. His father taught him that. Hard tasks or easy.

It’s only a question of where you put the decimal point…

He pushed back from the desk, which, along with one chair, one lamp and one cot, was the only piece of furniture in the place. A small TV set, a cooler, a garbage can. He also kept a few supplies here, things he used in his work. Thompson pulled the latex glove away from his right wrist and blew into it, cooling his skin. Then he did the same with his left. (You always assumed a safe house would get tossed at some point so you took precautions there’d be no evidence to convict you, whether it was wearing gloves or using a booby trap.) His eyes were acting up today. He squinted, put drops in, and the stinging receded. He closed his lids.

Whistling softly that haunting song from the movie Cold Mountain.

Soldiers shooting soldiers, that big explosion, bayonets. Images from the film cascaded through his mind.

Wssst…

That song disappeared, along with the images, and up popped a classical tune. “Bolero.”

Where the tunes came from, he generally couldn’t tell. It was like in his head there was a CD changer that somebody else had programmed. But with “Bolero” he knew the source. His father had the piece on an album. The big, crew-cut man had played it over and over on the green-plastic Sears turntable in his workshop.